


broken happy ever afters

by supernoodle



Category: One Piece
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Fix-It, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Offscreen character death, one-sentence mention of disassociation, stealth dr who crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:28:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22707745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/supernoodle/pseuds/supernoodle
Summary: Sabo has a compass he keeps on a chain around his neck.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 19





	broken happy ever afters

**Author's Note:**

> my writing inspiration is growing apace with my workload ;-;

Sabo has a compass he keeps on a chain around his neck.

It's always been there; he doesn't think about it until one day it slips out from behind his cravat, because nothing stays put when you're fighting crocodiles, and Ace grabs it.

Sabo slaps his hand away the same way he'd pull his own hand from a burning stovetop. 

Ace gives him a dirty look but doesn't grab it again, and Sabo scowls at him to mask the way his heart is beating in his chest like a bird in a box. He doesn't trust Ace, not really, not yet, no matter how much he likes him, but it's just a compass – it's just –

He tucks the compass back under his cravat and tightens the knots, and when Ace asks about it after they've butchered and cooked the alligator, mouth full of meat, Sabo whacks him with a femur.

“It's a compass,” he says. “Don't touch it.”

Ace needles at him and that's the end of it.

* * *

Sabo wakes up with burn scars and a compass on a chain around his neck and a head empty of memories. 

For a long while he feels like he's made of nothing but a tight knot of coals in his chest and the rest is made of smoke, useless and unreal. The adults look through him, give him curt answers when they answer at all, and nobody tells him where he is or why.

No one has time for an angry kid, so when the doctor changing his bandages tries to take away the compass she doesn't listen to him, and he throws her across the room, screaming.

The smokiness comes back for a bit, and when he comes back into his head his throat is raw, some of his burns are weeping red, and the room is wrecked. 

A tall man with wild hair and a crosshatched tattoo on his temple is standing in the middle of the matchstick remains of what might have been an exam table. There's a table leg in his hand, but his eyes are on Sabo and only on Sabo, and the weight in his unblinking stare feels like lead on his shoulders, finally pinning him to the ground.

* * *

Sabo wakes up with a newspaper in his hand and a compass around his neck and a head splitting with the weight of fragmentary memories and all they tell him is that his brother is dead.

His brother is dead.

He'd lost his brother and now his brother is dead.

He goes to Dressrosa and eats the Mera Mera no Mi, meets his other brother, completes the mission.

He goes back to base. He makes his report, Dragon's eyes on him and only him, and then he goes to his room and sits on his bed.

His brother is still dead.

He likely mourned Sabo, grew up, ate a devil fruit, went sailing, joined the Whitebeards.

Died with his past dragged up, killing the people Luffy says he loved. Died with a smile on his face and a thank you for people Sabo doesn't even know.

He's dead.

The fire under Sabo's skin feels like Grey Terminal, like a parasite, like thievery – a piece of a man he didn't get to know, hoarded in his scrabble to hold onto any scrap of a child's promise and a few years of running wild in the backwaters of East Blue.

The compass is suddenly heavy on his chest, all weighty brass and delicate engravings, solid in a way he can't ever remember it being because he never really thought about it before, but why wouldn't he have picked it up and used it, why else would he carry a compass – 

except

it's not really a compass, is it.

* * *

Sabo wakes up with something in the shape of an open compass in his hand, glass face cracked and golden motes of light still clinging to the grooves, the creases of his hand, the wrinkles of his shirt.

He wakes up with Time humming in the back of his head like the struck strings of an orchestra, and the power to conduct it spilling through the seams in his mind.

He can see, backwards and forward and sideways and upside-down in Time, eddying around him.

He can see the flicker of the fire beneath his skin before it lived there, when it was one with the One who burned fast and hot and desperate and brief.

He can see where That One's embers went out.

He lifts his hand and pulls.


End file.
